


A la recherche du temps perdu

by ConanDoylesCarnations



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: 1920s, Books, Fluff, It's been a v long time since I last wrote AO3 tags but anyway hope you enjoy!, Literature, M/M, Minific, Retirement!lock, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Watson understands Holmes better than anybody, a la recherche du temps perdu, marcel proust - Freeform, queer theory but disguised as a fanfic, suggestions of period-'appropriate' homophobia, wwi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:13:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24110368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConanDoylesCarnations/pseuds/ConanDoylesCarnations
Summary: The Great War over, Holmes and Watson think about the time they have lost, and the things that can't be spoken.  (And find some ways of speaking it.)In other words, I got distracted for an hour and wrote a one-page practical essay on queer theory and language theory, through the medium of Johnlock.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	A la recherche du temps perdu

**_London, 1922_ **

Watson had told him the other day about a new book, a book of colossal length and apparently of some cultural import, just beginning to be translated into English. He said it had to do with the War, although it had been started long before – about 1909, was it? At any rate, it was the title of the book that had settled most resolutely in the mind of Holmes, in that space at the back (or so he would always envision it) – the far more capacious and far more crowded space than most people, upon meeting him, presumed. ‘ _A la recherche du temps perdu_.’ He had corrected Watson’s pronunciation – a reflex reaction. Immediately afterwards he hoped he failed to remember the correction, for the error was so John Watson. One could not pinpoint in exactly what _way_ it was so much him – this specific slip – not even when that _one_ was Sherlock Holmes, who knew more than most people about most things and more than anyone in the world about John Watson – but it _was_ him, certainly. When it came down to it, it was in their mistakes that a person was most themselves. Mistakes, or rather, perhaps, _deviations_. How negative a charge had all these words! Holmes did not very much care for words. Words, like a spillage in the laboratory, or a policeman’s footprints all over the scene of a crime, occluded, complicated, lost, and ruined.

Watson had realised long ago how Holmes felt about words, and he had made the connection with his habitual long silences, which to most people were extended displays of eccentric impoliteness. They were, perhaps, a trifle eccentric, Watson admitted. But to him who understood Holmes’ wordless language (could _language_ possibly be the correct word? At times, Watson shared Holmes’ frustration), they spoke volumes. Volumes the length of Proust’s colossal book.

‘They’re not sure what to call it, in English,’ Watson had said. There wasn’t quite a way – an elegant, epigrammatic way – of translating it. The two of them had sat there with it, with those words floating between them, around them, like a heavy mist, a ghost: _à la recherche du temps perdu_. It was how they both felt: Watson had said as much as soon as he’d seen the title and been compelled to tell Holmes immediately (naturally; it was a clockwork reaction by now). When Holmes rolled off the sofa, however (such control, Watson always noted; even at this age, he had something of the ballerina in him, though such a tall and one would think awkwardly-shaped man. Such a beautiful man.) – and crossed the living room of 221B Baker Street to curl up, like a cat, on Watson’s lap, he knew that Holmes had understood, and felt, the same.

It was not just the War, for them, that had been _du temps perdu_. (Nor had it been for Proust, but Watson didn’t know that, although Holmes, somehow, half-suspected). It had been all those years of policing themselves, in public and even, often, in private. And it was not just the title that could not be translated, not just the feeling that could not be put into words, could not be vocalised.

At last, Holmes spoke, or rather murmured into Watson’s breast. ‘I would call it _In Remembrance of Things Past_.’ That was another thing that most people would never have expected of Sherlock Holmes: that he knew each of William Shakespeare’s first one hundred and twenty-six sonnets by heart. And Watson could not write it in his published tales of their experiences, but it had been a very early point of bonding between the two of them that he knew them all too.

And so perhaps it _could_ be spoken, after all. Or at least, perhaps it could be _suggested_. Watson kissed Holmes’ hair, the grey, nowadays, of iron filings. He couldn’t write that in the _Strand_ , either. But perhaps that was just another speaking silence. (He kissed him again, just to make sure.)

**Author's Note:**

>  _A la recherche du temps perdu_ is usually translated into English as 'In Search of Lost Time' or, as I've put into Holmes' mouth, 'Remembrance of Things Past' -- which is a line from Shakespeare's Sonnet 30. Marcel Proust was in fact gay and the novel came to be an important cultural touchstone for queer people in the early twentieth century.


End file.
